Yes. If we don't do this same activity in the USA we will find ourselves unable to speak one day. The Internet isn't free anymore. It's corporate controlled. If your asleep wake up. :-)
On Jun 12, 2011, at 7:25 PM, David Barrett <dbarrett at quinthar.com> wrote:
> Thanks Julian, care to comment on the technology elements or any of the
> factual items in the article?
>> -david
>> On 06/12/2011 04:11 PM, Julian Cain wrote:
>> The Obama administration helping dissidents? That's a lie. He's doing the opposite. Sheeple
>>>>>>>> On Jun 12, 2011, at 5:47 PM, David Barrett<dbarrett at quinthar.com> wrote:
>>>>> Anybody know anything about this? Sounds cool!
>>>>>> -david
>>>>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?_r=1>>>>>> The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow”
>>> Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine
>>> repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or
>>> shutting down telecommunications networks.
>>> Multimedia
>>>>>> Slide Show
>>> Technology for ‘Shadow’ Internet Networks
>>>>>> Graphic
>>> Creating a Stealth Internet
>>> The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone
>>> networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy
>>> novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of
>>> young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are
>>> fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet
>>> in a suitcase.”
>>>>>> Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be
>>> secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless
>>> communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
>>>>>> The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning
>>> documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York
>>> Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
>>>>>> Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing;
>>> others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in
>>> a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
>>>>>> The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth
>>> wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the
>>> reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according
>>> to participants in the projects.
>>>>>> In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the
>>> State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create
>>> an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on
>>> protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset
>>> the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services,
>>> seemingly at will.
>>>>>> The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President
>>> Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his
>>> rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled
>>> much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.
>>>>>> The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a
>>> longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture
>>> democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into
>>> autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More
>>> recently, Washington has supported the development of software that
>>> preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for
>>> citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned
>>> Internet without getting caught.
>>>>>> But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways
>>> for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of
>>> diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from
>>> at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new
>>> approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.
>>>>>> Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of
>>> enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government
>>> censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been
>>> burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North
>>> Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls,
>>> according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.
>>>>>> The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary
>>> Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort.
>>> “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile
>>> phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest
>>> against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton
>>> said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic
>>> opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she
>>> said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to
>>> each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
>>>>>> Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides:
>>> repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest
>>> activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware
>>> across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by
>>> the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure
>>> where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to
>>> surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a
>>> suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the
>>> New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.
>>>>>> “The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from
>>> infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr.
>>> Meinrath added.
>>>>>> The Invisible Web
>>>>>> In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely
>>> State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting
>>> multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself
>>> programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an
>>> accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped
>>> companies protect their digital secrets.
>>>>>> Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at
>>> age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up
>>> wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.
>>>>>> The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network”
>>> technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal
>>> computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub.
>>> In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly
>>> between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell
>>> “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.
>>>>>> Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless
>>> antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to
>>> administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to
>>> more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like
>>> Ethernet cables.
>>>>>> The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet
>>> and telecommunications developers.
>>>>>> “The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily
>>> control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose
>>> work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a
>>> functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have
>>> operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.
>>>>>> Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the
>>> bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say,
>>> using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.
>>>>>> In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost
>>> a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for
>>> unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones
>>> to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around
>>> Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology
>>> developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
>>>>>> Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial,
>>> said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher
>>> from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but
>>> shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most
>>> “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps
>>> dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly
>>> useless, he said.
>>>>>> “No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government
>>> slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or
>>> Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of
>>> sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”
>>>>>> That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up
>>> rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and
>>> technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site,
>>> estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside
>>> Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for
>>> running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies,
>>> however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an
>>> electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.
>>>>>> Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to
>>> receive State Department financing for a project that would modify
>>> Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being
>>> beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted
>>> network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase
>>> but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.
>>>>>> By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70
>>> million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to
>>> department figures.
>>>>>> Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the
>>> State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free
>>> speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at
>>> destabilizing autocratic governments.
>>>>>> That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an
>>> assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and
>>> social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their
>>> minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr.
>>> Shirky said.
>>>>>> He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of
>>> hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or
>>> otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi
>>> Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to
>>> undermine them.
>>>>>> Shadow Cellphone System
>>>>>> In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were
>>> taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a
>>> panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside,
>>> according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans
>>> were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001
>>> invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the
>>> country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to
>>> cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in
>>> other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.
>>>>>> There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only
>>> weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a
>>> combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the
>>> towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the
>>> countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks
>>> are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban
>>> to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.
>>>>>> The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project
>>> to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive
>>> forces exert control over the official network.
>>>>>> Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project,
>>> are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said
>>> it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A
>>> large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data
>>> collection point for the network, officials said.
>>>>>> A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up
>>> and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911
>>> system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.
>>>>>> By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent
>>> strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan
>>> security forces.
>>>>>> The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in
>>> Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And
>>> the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the
>>> local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most
>>> vital organs of the nation.
>>>>>> When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the
>>> American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would
>>> only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an
>>> “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said
>>> the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan
>>> government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”
>>>>>> “As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be
>>> premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.
>>>>>> Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United
>>> States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million
>>> to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who
>>> anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have
>>> insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan,
>>> which is pretty expensive,” the official said.
>>>>>> Broad Subversive Effort
>>>>>> In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the
>>> American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from
>>> North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know
>>> how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country,
>>> communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the
>>> cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on
>>> hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China,
>>> and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for
>>> cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The
>>> cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby
>>> Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster,
>>> who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls
>>> to collect information for broadcasts as well.
>>>>>> The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests
>>> just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts.
>>> From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military
>>> engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at
>>> the craving for open communication.
>>>>>> In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the
>>> son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said
>>> he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection
>>> in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in
>>> that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the
>>> uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he
>>> said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the
>>> existence of the World Wide Web.”
>>>>>>>>> Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren
>>> from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul,
>>> Afghanistan.
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